It’s not just a summer job, it’s an adventure

It’s not just a summer job, it’s an adventure

It is true among twenty-year old that if you work a crappy summer job with other twenty-year old, the only way to take your mind off it is fantasizing about having sex with your co-workers. You’re trapped together eight or 10 hours a day for three months, right? So what else is going make you dance to unheard melodies?

Meet James. He’s all set to move to New York when his dad loses his job and he’s forced to go work at a shabby amusement park in Pittsburgh. All the rides look secondhand, all the games are rigged and all the prizes look surplus. Your job is to get customers even more luckless than you are to throw baseballs at targets glued down, inflamed with hopes of taking home a Big Ass Panda. That’s what Bobby calls them when he tells you, “Nobody ever wins a Big Ass Panda.”

“Superbad” director Greg Mottola returns with a sweeter story now, quieter funnier again but about another hero who fears he may be a virgin outstaying his shelf life. Jesse Eisenberg from “The Squid and the Whale” plays James, who has a degree in Renaissance studies (the movie is set in the late ’80s and there may still have been a few jobs around). He’s out of his element at Adventureland; Bobby has to coach him on how to fake enthusiasm when announcing the horse race game where you advance your horse by rolling balls into holes. His performance reminded me uncannily of my last visit to Dave & Buster’s.

Most of the male employees at the park lust after Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), whose Adventureland T-shirt unfortunately advertises Rides. But James has eyes for Em (Kristen Stewart), who is quieter and deeper (Games). She’s smart, she’s quirky she seems more grown-up than the others. There’s a quick rapport, despite her sexual experience having a slight edge on his. She thinks he’s sorta sweet. They talk about things that require more than one sentence.

This fragile romance takes bloom while Mottola, also the screenwriter, cycles through a plot involving James’ friends, one of whom expresses his devotion by hitting him in the Netherlands every time he sees him. We cut often to the owner Bobby and wife Paulette (Kristen Wiig), who are lovebirds and have firm ideas about how every job at the park should be performed which doesn’t endear them to employees because they’re usually right. Oh, and then there’s Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the married good-looking maintenance man but why am I telling you this?

As their summer lurches between moments of deadly boredom and sudden emergencies (someone actually wins a Big Ass Panda), James and Em get closer together. This is absorbing because they slowly reveal themselves as smarter than anybody else has realized. Eisenberg I expected to like from his earlier work; what surprised me was how much I admired Stewart, who in “Twilight” was playing below her grade level. Here is an actress ready to do important things. Together with these others, they make “Adventureland” feel truer and sadder than maybe it sounds.

Uraban’s Crystal Lake Pool was where I spent two summers as an employee. Well, they called me a lifeguard and gave me free Cokes, but I didn’t sit in the lifeguard chair very often. As the lowest-ranking member of the staff, what I did do was go on Poop Patrol which meant that I had to plunge into the depths with a fly swatter and a bucket. There’s not much prestige when people clap for you while you’re carrying a bucket into the men’s room. (“Don’t spill it!” my boss Oscar Adams used to warn.) But there was another lifeguard there named Toni and well, never mind. I don’t think she ever knew.

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